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Ghost Games had "already begun work on future iterations" of Need for Speed

Need for Speed: Rivals developer Ghost Games was already busy with the next instalment in the racing franchise before their first foray into the IP was out the door. Ghost has been given control of the series.

The IP torch passed from Criterion which had reduced in size to 16 people, with most going on to form Ghost Games UK. Need For Speed: Rivals launched last month.

It's not known whether EA is pursuing an annual release for Need for Speed, which is what it had done in the past between Criterion and EA Black Box.

A job post for Ghost Games back in late October said "Ghost Games is currently developing Need for Speed Rivals for both current and next generation gaming consoles and has already begun work on future iterations of the franchise." Ghost Games boss Marcus Nilsson said back in late August that the series couldn't afford to keep going between two different style of developers, as it 'lost creditability'.

"We’re going to build it, we’re going to build it on Frostbite 3, people will see something they are familiar with every time we release the game. And I think that is the core basis of building a brand; that people know what to expect," he said.

Ghost creative director Craig Sullivan told VideoGamer.com in October that "the future is obviously Need For Speed because Ghost are picking up the Need For Speed banner, but that can mean many different things."

"We've done many different things at Criterion and Ghost in the past. When we finished Burnout Paradise we did a year of Paradise. We could stop and wait a few years and do another game or we could do another game sooner. Or we could do a service or we could do tablet stuff. The fact is, there are lots of different things we can do and we will make the decision on exactly what that's going to be once this game is done."

Need for Speed: Rivals released on PC, Xbox 360, PS3, Xbox One and PS4 in November. PC gamers were scandalised to discover that Rivals was capped at 30 frames per second no matter how powerful their desktop beasts may be. The modding community responded with an "almost flawless" workaround.